My interactive CD-ROM encyclopedia has no listing for spirituality, offering me only spiritual (an ethnic American musical form) and spiritualism (leading off with an anecdote about Harry Houdini). There is a comprehensive entry on religion but what led me to reflect on spirituality in education in the first place was the area where spirituality and religion part ways, the place where the spiritual lives on its own, independent of rites and rituals. My own religious/spiritual Mississippi wound its way majestically through Roman Catholicism, hit the twin rapids of adolescent skepticism and adult-onset hedonism, slowed down a little into the shoals of grudging agnosticism, sped up again during a long stretch of Compulsive Materialism (surely an American cult worthy of capitalization), and is currently charting a course through Zen Buddhism. Im still far from sure whether Im steering or whether Im simply standing on deck, waving, while the current takes me.

In the 1940s and 1950s the last great wave of Catholic elementary and secondary education washed over the baby boom generation in an almost sacramental manner, marking children for the rest of their lives as surely as baptism had. Before Vatican Council II, the Vietnam War, and the general upheaval in American certainties  cultural, sexual, and moral  the Roman Catholic education system was an apparent model of integrated secular and religious education. There were childrens Masses on Sunday, early morning Mass during the week, Novenas, school-wide attendance at the Stations of the Cross on the First Friday of every month, devotions to the Virgin Mary during the month of May, and special celebrations for saints who had a particular significance for American immigrants, e.g., Saint Patrick, Saint Anthony, Saint Therese of Liseux. There were catechism classes and marches through the halls to the adjoining church for Confession before holy days of obligation; there were Catholic Youth Organization-sponsored events from basketball games to bake sales, all coordinated by the nuns and priests who had given their lives to the Church  the pride of their families and the glory of Rome. For eleven years I spent eight weeks every summer at a camp dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima: over three hundred boys pledged allegiance to the American flag every morning minutes before trooping into the chapel for daily Mass. In the evening there were prayers at the shrine before we went back to cabins for ghost stories. Why then was there so little spirituality?

What I remember is numbers. The Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, the seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy, the three conditions necessary for a mortal sin, the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Decades of the Rosary. I remember more of the rules than is good for me but little if any connection between myself and other until my senior year in high school when a radical lay Theology teacher, hired at the last minute, introduced me to Martin Buber. Everything else was filtered through God. If I visited the sick or clothed the naked I received grace through God. Through God. God, the third point in every triangle, was, in a way, what separated me from spirituality because His presence in all things was a barrier between myself and everything else. What I was supposed to do, yes, I understood that; what I was supposed to avoid, yes. But what I was supposed to be, no, except that I was a sinner, conceived and born in sin, perpetually tempted to sin, prone to sin, risking eternal damnation through sin, and offending God through sin. How did that encourage spirituality?

If I gave in to sin I was rejecting God; if I committed myself to God I became Gods instrument, but I didnt become God. And the people who were supposed to be my examples? Sister Helen, old, frail, and thoroughly miserable, took out her great unhappiness at having to teach classes of fifty-plus recalcitrant children through sarcasm and favoritism. She was a poor advertisement for the consolations of a religious life. Other nuns, some of whom had entered the convent as far back as the 1920s, often failed to offer any deeper explanation than It would be sinful. Sister Anne wielded her truly frightening solid copper ruler (a gift one Christmas from the Union National Bank to every nun in the school) trying to bring us to order with a fury that may have been divinely inspired but was hardly inspirational. I discovered later that she was a highly trained woman, with an advanced science degree, who had been put in charge of an eighth grade because that was where the need existed. Whatever her spiritual aspirations had been upon entering the Order of St. Joseph, grammar school didnt meet them.

Aside from the Holy Spirit (renamed from the Holy Ghost but consistently shortchanged in discussions of the Trinity) there was never any discussion of ones spirit apart from ones soul (though spirit is perhaps a little fuzzier and therefore more suspect) and my soul was this amorphous something I had to get to Heaven through strict adherence to a near-infinite set of rules. (I should add that friends of mine who were brought up Italian Catholic as opposed to the Irish Catholicism I endured, testify that their religion was a much more compassionate, emotional environment.)

To be fair, the Church, in the years before guitar Masses on Saturday evening and priests in track suits, provided a tradition-rich atmosphere of inexhaustible opportunities for ceremonial observance, for participation in daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual rituals. I can warm myself in memories of the cadences of the Latin Mass, even in the richness of the vocabulary of the liturgy: monstrance, ciborium, surplice, Eucharist If only a classroom teacher or a priest had asked me what I thought my responsibility to myself and the world was, what the daily manifestations of my spiritual nature should be, why I was here. If only some of those bake sales had been held to raise money for emergency housing and medical supplies instead of trips to an amusement park. Teachers asked me (more often than my mother would have liked), Just who do you think you are? but no one asked me Who do you think God is? Who do you think anyone is? Who do you think you are?

I understand now, as I didnt then, that I grew up in a period that reflected the arrogance of a country that had recently won a World War, coupled with the paranoia of a society that suspected a Communist under every bed. What is instructive about our national personality is that our immediate response to those two influences was to become less emotional, less introspective, and more socially conservative. What little exposure I had to the spiritual in education came largely through English literature. There was Emily Dickinsons unique view of the world, safely buttoned at the lace collar, comfortably contained within a walled garden (or so we thought). More problematic  and therefore more intriguing  was Walt Whitman. However unobjectionable O Captain, My Captain, there were vague, swiftly diverted references to other, more obscure poems, poems that pushed and questioned and made demands. In senior English there was a passing reference to Emily Brontes mysticism, so dangerous that it had been suppressed by her loving sister Charlotte, and Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree had more spirituality in it than my whole junior year of Religious Studies.

Otherwise, the spirit and spirituality had no place in the curriculum, no role in daily life. There were perhaps a few students in high school, almost always female, who walked around with a sappy expression of benevolence on their face (this was before such an expression would make everyone think that they were on drugs) and they were assumed to have a religious vocation. In 1965 no boy would have retained a single friend or dared to go into the locker room if he had professed a desire to lead a more spiritual life. Unless he was such a broad-shouldered example of Christian virility that his classmates conceded he had been chosen (even involuntarily) by God for some higher purpose. Missionary work, most likely. The situation might be different today, but judging from the reports coming out of American high schools, via Oprah and Tom Brokaw, not much.

Once I left high school, and the Sixties, I didnt experience a society where there was so much organized religion and so little apparent spirituality until I taught in Saudi Arabia more than twenty years later. (Full disclosure: I was teaching Saudi military personnel how to use American missile systems.) The king was referred to as The Guardian, as in guardian of Mecca and Medina, the holiest sites in Islam. Prayer calls were broadcast five times a day and everything stopped. Students went to the mosque, stores closed, non-Moslem customers and clerks were sent out onto the sidewalk, and the national television network showed worshipers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Twenty-four hours a day religious police, as distinct from secular police, patrolled the streets making sure that all, Moslem and non-Moslem alike, observed strict adherence to the precepts of Islam. As I type this I recall my constant frustration at people who felt that they couldnt get a good mark on a test without Gods cooperation, who drove a hundred and ten miles an hour because it was Gods will whether or not one had an accident. But, it was very educational for me, an outsider, to have the chance to observe the public behavior of a conservative Moslem society. It allowed me to contrast it with the world I had myself grown up in, a similar hierarchical world with more than a passing resemblance to a military organization. I cant fault Moslems, based upon a few years experience in two or three Moslem societies, any more than I can condemn Catholicism because of how it was practiced in mid-century America, but I can observe that there seemed to be a sad tendency to fall back on the rule book and the list of punishments when regulating behavior. In discussions I had with Saudis, Afghanis, Iranians, Egyptians, and other Moslem believers it was always things you had to do and things you mustnt do and precisely what the punishment would be for this or that infraction. It was Mohamed, the Angel Gabriel and the Koran, just as in my youth it had been Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Saint Paul. A column in Jeddahs daily newspaper answered questions regarding travel, courtship, tithing, and property. There were guidelines regarding how big a cloth had to be to qualify as a prayer mat or what a wifes rights were if her husband repudiated her and sent her back to her fathers home. There were no questions that dealt with feelings of separation between the natural and the man-made world, no inquiries into obligations toward animals or rivers or the sand beneath ones feet. No apparent concern for the natural world at all, as far as I could see. I always thought the newly rich and powerful Middle Eastern desert kingdoms were reminiscent of America in the nineteenth century when industrialists subjugated and permanently scarred an entire continent.

The Saudi newspaper column was reminiscent of the talks we had in high school, the questions we asked the priest during Theology class: What if you were in the middle of eating a hot dog and realized it was Friday? Was the sin of finishing it less or greater than the sin of wasting the hot dog if you didnt finish it? What if you had a date on Friday night and you masturbated before you went out so that you wouldnt be driven to involve your date in a sin of the flesh? Was it still a mortal sin? Where was the spirituality?

In West Africa I was exposed for the first time to a society where people saw themselves as responsible for maintaining an equilibrium between nature and the human community. Although millions of people still found themselves involved in the tense and even bloody aftermath of longstanding tribal conflicts, they did not reject the world they were living in. The country itself had been arbitrarily created by colonial masters with pens and a map and yet there was an ever-present openness to all aspects of the physical world, reflected in the indigenous animism. There was no separation between person and place; creation was not something to be subdued or modified or improved. Even after hundreds of years of bombardment by economic and religious missionaries, the Ivorians lived in an environment of co-dependence between humans, trees, snakes, birds, army ants, and each other. If Tibet is a country where every breath is a prayer, the Ivory Coast was a place where both sentient and insentient beings possessed spirits.

A developed countrys educational system will encapsulate, reflect, preserve, and propagate its deepest cultural values. Here in America, a profoundly conventional society, we place a high value on the measurable, the quantitative, and the factual. In our mobile, fragmented, low-context environment we demand facts because we havent enough time for the ambiguities of the spiritual. Hi, Ive just been transferred here from Dayton. My kids went to school there for three years; we were in Scranton before that. The school said theyd send the records. Im divorced so my kids may be a couple of days late coming back from school breaks because they spend the time with their mother. Heres an emergency number where you can call me, but it really has to be an emergency. I know I missed the first parent/teacher night, but Ill try to make the one in the spring. Jonathan is good at math but it takes him time to make friends. Stephanie is very outgoing but shes not the hardest worker in the class. Make sure you push her.

We determine an intelligence quotient for our citizens. Standardized testing. National surveys and the resultant statistics to designate, relegate, substantiate, and appropriate. This form of information-gathering is perfect for finding out how many children of minorities cant read, how many cancer patients survive for five years after the onset of their disease, or in which regions of the country the upper middle-class is going to retire. It is, though, virtually useless in determining whether children mind being set up in competition with their peers virtually from birth. It is useless for discovering whether children feel a spiritual connection to their classmates, their teachers, their families, or their world. It is useless in discovering what they think they are doing here or whether their teachers care about them or what they are afraid of or how they cope with fear or success or failure. It provides no model for an integrated, expanding philosophy of how to live ones life. It establishes no viable bridge between the minority child, the cancer survivor, and the health-club members of the privileged class.

Throughout my own education, up to and including my formation as a teacher in college and graduate school, I was clearly taught what mile-posts would determine my professional standing. A certain economic advancement would be sacrificed for initials after my name; the rewards businessmen and women accrued from working fourteen-hour days in an office would be denied to me, but in return I would have summers free. If I were smart, I would take my obligatory Masters degree in Education or in Administration, thus becoming a more attractive candidate for an eventual job outside the classroom.

Now I am in the American elementary public school system which, in New York at least, strictly regulates discussions of religion and spirituality except, oddly, in history lessons about Native Americans. Perhaps a group so completely disenfranchised poses no threat to the contemporary cultural status quo. Native Americans can be revered for their spirituality since there is so little chance of ever having to deal with it. Recently I have canvassed students from three different public high schools. Two of them told me that they had studied the history and outstanding characteristics of the worlds major religions, both ancient and contemporary. None had been addressed directly, under school supervision, by a minister, a rabbi, a priest, an abbess, or a monastic. None felt that they had been given any significant spiritual grounding for their current lives as adolescent Americans or their future as adults. All spoke confidentially of their need for some guiding philosophy.

Although it is impossible to go through the winter holiday season without referencing Christian symbols and traditions, there are no open talks about the meaning of Christmas; nor, for that matter, is there any discussion of the Jewish holidays taking place during the same season. Probably ninety percent of New York public schools schedule their spring break to coincide with Easter but no mention is made of the Passion or Resurrection. As a Buddhist I am actually lucky to belong to a group perceived more as a sort of chic Epicurean philosophy than as a viable religion. I can come to school with mala beads wound around my wrist where I would not be able to walk the halls with a rosary in my hand. With a history of having lived overseas I (like the Native Americans) am marginal enough to be interesting without being subversive, like a Hopi basket over in the corner, or a silk screen of Kyoto. Isnt that interesting?

My students of English as a Second Language are  this year  from Puerto Rico, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and Guyana. They talk comfortably about their religions: Islam, Catholicism, and Evangelical Christianity. In previous years Ive taught Pentecostals, animists, and Baptists. Their religion is generally an integral part of their lives; often they have been sponsored for immigration by a local religious organization. They are completely unselfconscious about telling me Bible stories or asking me if I eat certain forbidden foods; the younger Moslem students are very excited when they are allowed by their parents to fast for a day or two during Ramadan. Nevertheless, somewhere around second or third grade, religion stops being nourishment, stops being the world they inhabit and becomes something more finite, more measurable yet less substantial, subtly distinct from other aspects of their lives. I watch what I consider spirituality diminish and fade until, perhaps five years later it is for them, as it was for me, a poem by Emily Dickinson or perhaps their first serious romantic involvement. My own spiritual teacher exhorts me to bring my practice into the folding of a shirt, the paring of a vegetable, the handing over of a dollar bill to a clerk. The indrawing of a breath, the curve of my hands in their mudra. I come to school every day uncertain of how to impart that universal attention to the moment that sanctifies the mundane.

In the course of their day my students will study math as a set of patterns and formulae but will they be asked what the different aspects of their lives add up to? Will they even be asked to reflect on what the fearful and glorious symmetry of the universe means? They will study social studies with perhaps no clear idea of what social implies and whom or what it includes. They will explore science with only limited attention paid to their own dependence upon and contribution to the natural world. They will have hours of English Language Arts and yet annoy their teachers through an inability to explicate literary texts or infer feelings and motivations or predict outcomes. How could they? There is no real media outlet  television, cinema, or video game  fostering any meaningful inquiry. There is little if any value placed upon a spiritual life and so how are they to see relationships or anticipate outcomes?

Education, of course, is not just what happens in the classroom. Greek vase paintings tell us more about quotidian life than the tragedies and comedies of Sophocles and Aristophanes. Elian Gonzales Miami lawyer, protesting the childs possible return to Cuba, announced that Elian was well on his way toward becoming a model American: the child thought Burger King was wonderful, he spent hours playing video games, and he loved Disney World. This apparently constitutes a well-rounded American childhood. I havent been to Disney World so there may be a pavilion named Spiritland but if so, I havent heard of it.

Amazingly, in spite of our consecrated materialism, spirit survives, perhaps most notably in the concept of school spirit or team spirit. Students retain hard-to-explain attachments to their alma mater and will go back to a former high school to visit, long after any principal or teacher they knew is still there. They will make a lifetime commitment to a sports team that holds out the promise of specific and general community. On reflection, it is logical that high school exerts such a hold on people since adolescence is, after infancy, the developmental time of life when ones feelings and perceptions are most febrile, most attuned to self and other. Adolescents, suddenly old enough to know that the monsters under the bed arent nearly as scary as the monsters in the streets, yearn to be offered a spiritual grounding, a philosophical rationale for their lives. If they werent, why would they so eagerly embrace music, sex, Hollywood, controlled substances  any pastime, even violent ones, which promise an expansion of awareness, a release from the confines of the physical self? Yet our schools seem only to demonstrate a continued determination to prohibit.

My first-grade students spill into my room like multi-colored skeins of wool from a basket, tangled masses of loose potential. I know they can be knit as easily into tense, discordant mats as into objects of warmth, comfort, and strength. I am energized by their willingness to listen, to experience, and to experiment. They can shift back and forth between the spirit, the word, and the object effortlessly and they are still willing to give everything equal value. By fifth grade it can take half of the year to encourage them to reveal themselves, to manifest themselves spiritually, to accept their essential nature. In todays educational system what will they be like if they come back to visit me in ten years? Who, myself included, is educating them to expand their spiritual nature until it embraces the ten thousand things? How can I deepen my own practice to the point where, when they speak of me they dont say He is a good Buddhist or He was brought up with strong Catholic values but He sets a good example because he is a spiritual man.

Drew Hodo Coffee, MRO became a student in 1997 and received jukai two years later. He now lives in Albany, NY and teaches English as a Second Language at the elementary school level.